Stars Without Makeup: Molly Ringwald

Looking good, right? It’s just girlfriend, on her way to the gym, doing her thing and looking pretty much the same as she did back in her Brat Pack heydey, and it’s probably because she’s busy working on books, which we all know is just SO EASY.

Molly‘s latest career endeavor is penning the book, ‘When It Happens to You’, which is an account of limits and possibilities of love in families and relationships. From Jacksonville.com:

Ringwald changes vantage points using the contemporary novel-in-stories format. Connecting stand-alone stories lets a writer economically cover lots of territory around a core character or theme: there’s no need to fill in every detail or resolve every question.

In the opening story, the reader sees what 40ish Californian Greta sees, and more. You connect the dots to surmise that Greta’s husband Philip is involved in a serious affair, and intelligent Greta would see it too, except that she’s desperately focused on looking the other way. In a conventional narrative, discovery and a resulting marital blowup would follow quickly. Here, subsequent stories work through the destruction with less predictable timing as they introduce new characters whose lives directly or glancingly intersect with the couple’s crisis.

The book’s great strength is its unblinking but compassionate look at the intertwined lives of well-meaning, but flawed, 21st-century Americans. The spirit of the book is perfectly distilled in its remarkable portrait of the unhappy couple’s daughter: 6-year-old Charlotte is not an angel, an imp or a case history, but a mixed bag of humanity like each of the other characters.

On the whole, the book doesn’t sound bad. It, at least, sounds a hell of a lot better than *my* book, which is about forty pages long, and thirty-nine of those forty pages completely suck. But hey. We can’t excel in all fields, you know?

I just finished that book. It was really good. Actually, shockingly good. I am so used to celebrities just getting things like book deals, gallery showings, etc. based on who they are instead of having any talent, my expectations were very low. And I liked the way she used the short stories and multiple perspectives to tell a larger story. It was like she got to the core by nibbling in from the edges.